Beyond demands for more transparency: the importance of scale in institutional information‎ practices

A detailed study of how public-private infrastructure partnerships are governed and rendered visible, mainly in Canada, shows that accountability is not reducible to the availability of information about individual projects. The very same information practices that make projects visible to the public work to conceal most or even all important information about the underlying decision-making processes. This finding suggests that the spatiotemporal scale of institutional information has important political as well as organizational effects. About the Speaker Mariana Valverde is Professor of Criminology at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto. Her main research interests are: urban law and governance (historically and in the present), and, at the theoretical level, Foucault, sexuality studies, theories of spatiotemporality, and actor-network theory. She is the author of six sole-authored books, six co-edited collections, about 50 refereed journal articles, and various research reports and popular publications.